Many describe Saira Keltaeva as one of the most unique phenomena emerging from the modern Uzbek art scene in recent decades. Born on May 16th, 1961, in the village of Kumyshkan, located in the Tashkent region of modern day Uzbekistan, her oil paintings master the use of vibrant color and ethnographic decoration to create portraits […]

We asked three participants of our Art and Museums in Russia program in St. Petersburg: “If you could introduce everyone to 3-5 pieces of Russian art, what would those pieces be?” Here are the students and the essential art works they chose: Kimberly Gordy Kimberly Gordy is a student at the University of Texas […]

“Happiness on canvas” is a phrase that well describes the early works of Zinaida Serebriakova. Best known for her vibrant, joyful style, it’s only natural that the her largest exhibit of the last 30 years, timed at the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death and the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution, coincided with spring […]

Forty years ago, near the dusty shores of the retreating Aral Sea, Communist Party officials visited the Museum of Igor Savitsky. Savitsky, affectionately called “Junkman” by his friends and associates, was an artist. Under the nose of State officials (and sometimes with their funds), he amassed a collection of over eighty thousand banned Russian avant-garde […]

The only way to peek into Moscow’s past prior to invention of photography is through paintings and works of masters of historical reconstruction. In this article, we will compare the look of old Moscow with how we see it today. Fedor Alekseev’s painting “View of the Resurrection and Nikolsky Gates and the Neglinny Bridge from […]

Isaak Izrailevich Brodsky (Исаак Израилевич Бродский) was a Soviet painter whose work is especially notable for its role in the formation of the socialist realism art movement and for his works depicting Lenin. His paintings capturing events of the Russian Civil War and the Bolshevik Revolution are also notable. Brodsky was born on January 6, […]

The Leningrad School was a prominent school of painting during the majority of the Soviet period, 1930-1990. Emanating from the Ilia Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (named for the famous nineteenth century realist painter and renamed the St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture after the collapse of the USSR), it produced […]

The only way to peek into Moscow’s past prior to invention of photography is through paintings and works of masters of historical reconstruction. In this article, we will compare the look of old Moscow with how we see it today. Past painting: Louis-Pierre-Alphonse Bichebois. Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed, Beginning of 19th Century. Present […]

I was born in an old one-story merchant’s house in the Taganka District of Moscow. Our house stood on the corner of Vorontsovskaya Street, which then had a tram track, and Mayakovsky Pereulok. At one time, Vladimir Mayakovsky lived at the end of that pereulok, and my grandmother used to tell me how more than […]

A native Moscovite, Vladimir Kachanov has been painting Moscow for over forty years. His paintings depict old Moscow that many Moscovite’s today are unfamiliar with. Kachanov’s paintings of old Moscow courtyards and boulevards now serve as historic documents showing what Moscow was like before the construction and demolition boom of the 1990s. Kachanov paints with […]

Winter is the most fairytale-like time of year. Everything around is covered with a sparkling white quilt; only purity and mystery remain. It is impossible not to fall in love with winter. AdMe.ru, a Russian site, has put together a list of four artists in Russia who capture the beauty of the season. This translation […]

The Faces of Kyrgyzstan is a project of the popular Russian-language website Limon.kg based in Kyrgyzstan. The project presents those natives of Kyrgyzstan which have helped form the current country and especially its modern culture. The profiles are presented on Limon.kg in Russian. Translation was performed by Sophia Rehm, a SRAS Home and Abroad Scholar […]